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Forum:Family categories--do we still do those?
We still create categories for families, right? Do we still create articles? This is in reference to the Fergusons of Supervolcano. TR 20:10, January 8, 2012 (UTC) I have no objections but don't know what policy we have on the matter. ML4E 21:27, January 8, 2012 (UTC) We still create categories, provided the potential categlroy meets all the criteria for creation as all the others: more than three members, growth potential, non-redundant, etc. We still have Category:Prominent Families and it has 29 articles; they're not all lists of who's who in reference to the family's most important character, but most of them are. I believe our most recent creation, and certainly the one which draws from the most recently published work, is Radcliffe. The importance of that would seem to speak for itself. Otherwise it's useful for keeping track of large families, especially if it takes a bit of explaining to show who fits in where. Take Yeager, for instance. Jonathan, and Karen, and their two sons. Then there are the two adopted Lizards, whose unnamed biological mother we did meet in one scene, though her name was not given, and she does not have an article. Sam comes home at the end of HB to find that he's now got descendants out to four generations; who wouldn't have trouble keeping track of that, when everyone's introduced at once? And just to add another layer HT teased us with the "possibility" that Heinrich Jager is a distant cousin of Sam's, which makes Ludmila an in-law. Driver is a bit more straightforward: Cincy's parents, Cincy's wife, Cincy's kids, Cincy's grandkids, Cincy's kids' spouses. Achilles's parents-in-law popped up fairly regularly throughout the second half of the series, and in the last scene we meet Amanda's father-in-law and brother-in-law. Still, that's fourteen people with four last names and two unnamed characters, so a list of who's who all in one place is useful. Galtier is even more straightforward, but it's a huge, old-time Quebecois family, and of Lucien's six kids only two of them ever did anything that would make enough of an impression on a reader that we could remember who's who as soon as we saw the name. Add in O'Doull, his parents, Paulette Archambault and her father, each of whom had only one scene apiece, and it's useful to have a little something to jog your memory. (If we filled in all the unnamed characters that list would go on and on and on, by the way: Toward the end of Lucien's life, he runs through how many grandkids he has from eah of his children, and in the younger Lucien's wedding scene O'Dull catches us up with more recent additions. Slightly more relevant is Lucien's brother-in-law, who attended Marie's funeral but never got a name.) Others, like Semphroch and Gimpel and especially Scipio's Family, are shorter and simpler and should probably be considered for deletion. The Fergusons look like they're just two parents and three kids, so they probably don't merit an article. That would change if a bunch of uncles and cousins and in-laws show up later in the book. :At the end of the first book, Colin Ferguson marries Kelly Birnbaum and we meet her parents (with some details mentioned, worthy of articles whenever) and a throw-away mention of Colins's sister and her husband (don't think either warrant articles). Just F.Y.I. but growth potential is there in later books, especially if any of the kids marry. ML4E 20:28, January 9, 2012 (UTC) Back in the day, if someone was a viewpoint character for six or seven books, making up a full generation of in-universe chronology, and was then replaced with a younger relative for three or four more after their death, it was fairly certain we'd run into a good number of relatives over the years. (Not always; we only got Chester Martin's immediate family, Morrell only had a wife and daughter, and from Featherston, no relatives whatsoever despite Mak's little prank. Same goes for Dowling and Carsten, though without the prank.) These days HT's stories usually don't last long enough to generate large families. TWTPE will run to six books, but, with the exception of Sarah Goldman, the characters there still aren't rounded out enough for family to matter much to them. That changed a little bit last year; Dernen visited his parents and siblings, Weinberg put a bun in La Martellita's oven and wound up having a shotgun wedding, and Peggy was finally reunited with Herb. But characters' personal lives aren't nearly as important to TWTPE as they were to other stories, and since the story itself only covers a few years. . . . Turtle Fan 00:55, January 9, 2012 (UTC)